How to Measure ABM and Prove Impact Like a Pro

How to Measure ABM and Prove Impact Like a Pro

It’s 4th & goal, with seconds left and the game on the line. How will you make sure you find the end zone and win the game?

For nearly a century, most professional sports franchises measured the same stats, from RBIs and batting averages, to goals and assists, to passing yards and touchdowns. Nothing had changed for years. But then along came modern statistical analysis. It was clear – looking at different stats provided different insight and different results. Better results. Thus, the Moneyball era was born.

B2B marketing is undergoing the same shift. Marketers are re-evaluating the relevance of traditional metrics like click-throughs, page visits, and social shares. Why? Because in B2B marketing, there’s no way to know how a page view influenced the purchasing decisions of the buying committee in a complex deal.

In the modern era of marketing, it’s time for different success metrics. A new way of marketing (i.e., Account Based Marketing) calls for a new way of measuring.

In this presentation, Jon Miller, CEO and co-founder of Engagio, revealed his brand new book, The Clear & Complete Guide to ABM Analytics. This is the most comprehensive guide for measuring B2B marketing, and it will answer all of your marketing analytics questions.

Top takeaways:

Engagement is the most fundamental ABM metric since it answers the key question: Do the right people from the right accounts spend time with our company?

If you’re not going after the right accounts to begin with, your ABM strategy will fall flat. Shari Johnston, SVP of Marketing at Radius, explains the importance of taking a data-driven approach to your target account list selection.

Top takeaways:

Everyone involved in your go-to-market process must be on board with your account selection process, not just sales.

The whole point of ABM is focusing, so you cannot let the fear of missing out distract you from the task at hand.

After you find the right accounts, dive one level deeper and find the right contact data.

Do you have a rock-solid understanding of your Total Addressable Market? How can you measure your ABM progress without it? Tracy Eiler, CMO at InsideView, gives actionable ways to set up your ABM program for success.

Top Takeaways:

ABM is a great forcing function for alignment, and you must be aligned around people, processes and technology.

The traditional funnel is obsolete. The customer journey looks much more like a figure-eight since you’re maintaining an ongoing relationship with the customer and the opportunity for them to buy more. We must keep continuous engagement with that account

In this session, Justin Gray, CEO of LeadMD, explores the key measures you need to establish a benchmark prior to embarking on an ABM Pilot. If you can’t show where you’ve been, in an open and honest manner, you’ll never get the buy in, necessary to propel ABM in your org.

Top Takeaways:

Learn how moving away from waterfall marketing can increase conversion rates by 20x.

Digital marketing is undergoing a major shift. You need the right data to understand how accounts are truly engaging with your content to succeed. Join Elle Woulfe, VP of Marketing at LookBookHQ, in this session to make sure you don’t fumble on when the game is on the line.

Top Takeaways:

The big problem is that the metrics we use to measure qualification are very shallow (clicks, form fills, and downloads) – they don’t tell you how truly educated and qualified a buyer is. You know they clicked – but you don’t know if they read. You have no idea if that buyer is better educated and ready to talk to sales than before they clicked. You need to know if they actually consumed the content.

“Engaged intent” is the single best indicator of sales readiness. A buyer that spends meaningful time with high value content is showing a deep level of interest and intent to buy, and that buying signal is more powerful than any passive click or form-filled data that you depend on today to determine who is qualified. It tells your team once and for all – what is really working.

Everyone understand the metric of time, and when you can parse out who is spending more time with you, you’re able to identify better leads for your sales team.

ABM takes a new approach with both strategy and tactics. It also requires measuring your performance in different ways. Peter Isaacson of Demandbase addresses common issues and offers practical advice for measuring ABM performance.

Top Takeaways:

Marketers are often challenged to understand effectiveness because their metrics are tied to different systems – web analytics for traffic, lead management to track behavior, CRM to track pipeline. So they need a way to tie all of these leading metrics together.

When you consider the campaign metrics and the types of leads you are generating, it is important to consider how these will impact your revenue. You need to look at what sales cares about, so that the organization can be best aligned. Sales need to make sure they are on track to hit their numbers for the quarter and year Having intelligence on how the marketing programs are performing toward these goals, will help them better assess whether they will hit their goals.

Traditional campaign metrics, while still important for evaluating programs, will become leading indicators of progress toward key business objectives. It is these business objectives which show a substantive change/improvement in the company’s operations and show the ability to bring in revenue.

Brandon Redlinger is the Director of Growth at Engagio, the Account Based Marketing and Sales platform that enables teams to measure account engagement and orchestrate human connections at scale. He is passionate about the intersection between tech and psychology, especially as it applies to growing businesses. You can follow him on twitter @brandon_lee_09 or connect with him on LinkedIn.